Introduction to Cloud and AWS

What is the cloud?

“Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing”- AWS. Cloud Computing enables businesses to transfer upfront costs of infrastructure and compute resources to Cloud Service Providers in exchange for a variable pricing structure and on demand provisioning.

Humble beginnings

The Cloud initially was designed to mirror traditional on-premises data centers to store massive amounts of data organizations acquired in day-to-day operations. To facilitate business operations such as the Netflix streaming platform; large data centers needed to be constructed and maintained to create, distribute, maintain, and archive large data sets with near-precision availability and durability. The innovation of the cloud allowed tech companies to forgo the huge financial upfront costs to build infrastructure and utilize existing models in exchange for pay-as-you-go storage, hence Amazon S3 Storage, which provides limíteles tiered object-based storage for less than a penny, combined with 99.999999999 durability and 99.99 availability guarantees.

AWS Cloud 202[0-9]

Currently, AWS offers over 100 unique services that cater to specific business functions like Quantum Ledger(a fully managed blockchain platform), and Amazon Sage Maker (Amazon's Machine Learning building platform ) and is constantly growing day to day to solve core business requirements from global customers.

The breath of AWS core services currently are divided into the following categories:

• Compute: Services like EC2, and Lambda that solve traditional hardware requirements with virtualized resources and container management.

• Storage: Services like S3 and EBS Block Store augment traditional immediate or long-term back storage requirements.

• Networking: Services like VPC and Route 53 replicate traditional on-premises network requirements without the need for network racks or switches and routers with breakneck speeds.

• Application Management: Services like CloudWatch that aim to audit, configure, and monitor account services and resources

• Database: Services like Aurora and Dynamo DB that offer managed data solutions for both relational and NoSQL database structures.

• Security & Identity: Services like IAM and AWS IAM Identity Center provide authentication and authorization to AWS resources and seamless user account federation with services like google and Active Directory.

The key to fully understanding the power of AWS is that one can seamlessly recreate core business structures with minimal loss, hardware capacity, and time to build. With a few clicks, a three-tier application structure can serve hundreds of thousands of users, with data processing and storage scalability that would be otherwise unheard of 10-20 years ago.